The invention relates to a piezoelectric device. The invention also relates to a machine tool having at least one piezoelectric device.
Piezoelectric actuators can be used in many ways and they are therefore available in various forms such as, e.g. stacked actuators, disk translators, bender or tube actuators. Among others, one field of application of piezoelectric actuators is controlled vibration damping in machine tools.
Piezoelectric actuators are driven by means of power amplifiers which provide the required drive voltages. Here, the magnitude of the drive voltage depends on the type of piezoelectric actuator. Thus, there are low voltage actuators which supply drive voltages up to 100 volts or 200 volts and high-voltage actuators which supply drive voltages up to 600 volts, 1000 volts or 2000 volts.
In this context, the power amplifiers are adapted to the respective piezoelectric actuator. No uniform standards exist, so that in the case of a numerically controlled machine tool, apart from the numerical control with power amplifiers for the servo motors, other power amplifiers are required for the piezoelectric actuators. However, using additional electronic assemblies has many disadvantages: no direct coordination is possible between the numerical control which drives the servo motors and the piezoelectric actuators. It is not possible to achieve advantages of rationalization by means of large batch sizes. Service and spare parts management are not uniform. The commissioning and optimization strategy differs between the servo motors and the piezoelectric actuators. This doubles the required personnel.
There is thus no uniform software and hardware for servo drives and piezoelectric actuators. The piezoelectric actuators do not communicate via the bus of the numerical control but hardware different from this and incompatible with it is used for controlling the piezoelectric actuator mechanism, which stands in the way of any further use of piezoelectric actuators in machine tools.